At my job I handle magazines. There are magazines of
every sort. News magazines and sports magazines. Car
magazines and business magazines. In all of them you find
beautiful people. In the advertisements you find beautiful
people, on the editorial boards you find beautiful people,
and, most emphatically, in the personalities portrayed in the
articles you find beautiful people. In these magazines these
beautiful figures are held up as something extraordinary, as
something other. This is the tone in all the publications,
regardless their persuasion. It didn't take me long working
at my job to notice this. Maybe twenty minutes. Having
abstained from media for the couple of years previous, I had
fallen out of the habit of seeing these sports heroes and
politicians, these pop stars and web barons in such
flattering light. In fact, encountering them then afresh, I
saw through this visual hyperbole right away. It was
startling. A few minutes later I came to the conclusion I was
no longer convinced by this display. In fact, I looked at
this "beauty" and I felt rather offended that it was
presented to me as something extraordinary.

"I see women as pretty as this in the supermarket all of
the time," I thought. "You can go into any nightclub," I
thought, "And find a girl as sexy as that fairly easily. You
don't even have to try."

My job counting these magazines into bundles for
delivery requires me to look at them again and again,
repeatedly, for ten or so hours at a time, two days a week.
Over the next three months, as I continually endured this
strange and fresh affront, I thought about what was happening
in the magazines I handled. And I considered, too, what was
beginning to happen in me as I looked at them. For my
magazine naivete began to breakdown. I, like everyone else,
began to believe. Even as I surrendered, though, even as I
began to accept and embrace the "beauty" of the images, I
knew they were not particularly impressive. Intellectually I
saw that the faces in them were not remarkable, but
emotionally I still felt drawn to them. What was going on?

It seems to me now, after a year or so of sorting this
process out in myself, that we are drawn to these images by a
sly but very potent need in us. Unconsciously, I think, we
all seek to understand the most appealing part of our own
beings, the most prized in us, or, our own beauty. And we
have intimations of what our beauty is, we sense it. But, in
those intimations, we also sense our beauty's power. This
scares us. We react then by giving our beauty a symbolic
form, a form we can hold out at arm's length, objectively,
safely apart from ourselves. This is my explanation for why
we so willfully hold up such normal looking people as
examples of such extraordinary beauty. We are using them, I
believe, as symbols of a greatness within ourselves, a
greatness we cannot face.

This impulse does not stop at physical beauty. We do it
in other genres of significance as well. We are always
making things grander than they are, giving them more force
than they truly have, and then holding them at a distance.
The best restaurant in town, for example, is not going to be
in the building at the end of our street. It's going to be
on the other side of the city. It is a thing of excellence,
of beauty. It is a greatness. Therefore it must be far away,
distant, barely approachable. The most appealing object in
our collection of marbles is not the one we swapped with our
next door neighbor, but the one we found in a distant foreign
land. Our most prized wisdom is not the familiar wive's
tale, but the contents of the arcane scroll, or the seldom
uttered formula, or a generations-old family recipe. The
"most beautiful" things around us are never the most
familiar, like, say, the grass in our yard or the color of
the bricks in our town.

We see the highest beauty in what is far, in what is
apart, distant, other, different, like celebrities. And yet,
in holding these symbols before ourselves, in finding a way
to make our own beauty objective instead of subjective, we
inevitably mistake the symbols we have created for the
reality they represent. This is what the magazines
capitalize on, this mistake. It's what they teach us to do
even. And what they profit from to our glowing satisfaction.
We get so caught up in how the symbols of our beauty move us
that we even lose our intimations that its reality is far
from extra and even ordinary. These symbols make it possible
for us to look upon the unapproachable greatness of ourselves
without being consumed by the greatness of ourselves. But,
at the same time, they obscure the fact that our greatness is
closer to us even than the girl in the supermarket, or the
marble in our pocket, or the wisdom of our children.

Our beauty has a power that cannot be contained. Its
force is so great that, despite us, it escapes us to become
objective symbols. We behold it then apart from ourselves,
tamed into images and personalities that aren't that
extraordinary at all. But the true reality of our beauty is
there to be discovered by the daring. Definitely, it is.
Find a man brave enough to realize the woman in his bed is
more beautiful than the actress in the film; find a man who
realizes the square meter of earth he stands on is as exotic
as any square meter beside the river Seine; find a man who
understands that silent longing in his chest is a more
powerful song than any music he will ever pay to hear, and
you have found a man who is courageous enough to embrace his
own beauty, who is strong enough to grapple with his own
reality, to face its force truly, stripped of all symbol and
disguise.